[arbutus]

It's important to be able to see people who look like your potential future self. There's more to it than just seeing neat work - everyone needs role models.

Kids are very perceptive. This girl sounds lucky to have parents who encourage her in STEM topics, but that doesn't shield her from media/misguided school teachers/councillors/other kids telling her these things aren't for her. Having a female role model is a powerful thing.

[JohnHaugeland]

I'm a man and I modelled my professional self on a woman, so I have some difficulty with this.

I believe that choosing to limit one's role models by gender is a problem.

[amputect]

The average man in an engineering discipline can trivially meet other male engineers, and will be pretty much surrounded by them anywhere they work. This would be true at the grade-school level up through the pinnacle of their careers.

This is not true for women. This guy's daughter might be the only girl in her class who feels comfortable expressing an interest in engineering. She might go on to be one of a tiny (and steadily decreasing) number of women in an overwhelmingly male university-level engineering program. Can you imagine how it might be nice to at some point be able to meet and learn from someone whose life experiences more closely match your own, and learn from the experiences that they have (or will have) in common?

[JohnHaugeland]

If the issue is how common the people are going to be by demographic in the workforce, then shouldn't we start early in making them comfortable with the people they're going to be around, as the ice breaking generation, by mentoring them with the common rather than the rare?

I mean I genuinely do not understand why this is actually helpful. The lady engineers I talk to are either all pandering to me, or are as confused as I am.

I don't understand why we're presuming that a girl can't have a good, positive male role model, just like I, a boy, had a good, positive female role model.

.

"She might go on to be one of a tiny (and steadily decreasing) number of women in an overwhelmingly male university-level engineering program."

So, as we bucketted women out of the mainstream and told them they could only learn from people like themselves, their global participation began to drop.

I mean really, the data you're recommending seems to suggest that what we're doing is destructive.

It was not the case, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's work, that the newly liberated woman was expected to learn only from other women. They're supposed to be equal.

The supporting claims seem to be assertions of better-ness with no supporting data or logic other than an intuitive feeling that the child's recognition of similarity is somehow more important than the child's early exposure to diversity (something most data backed child rearing studies disagree with.)

I do understand that your opinion is that a girl will have an emotional need to only learn from women.

Do you have any data to defend this? This seems bizarre and offensive to me, as it does to the female engineer who spoke up elsewhere in this thread.

I think that, just like men, women can learn from anyone, and should choose the best source, not the most similar source.

You can't create an inclusive society by educating explicitly exclusively, in my viewpoint.

I would love to see actual data, rather than beliefs or opinions, which suggest that learning from a demographically similar role model produces better results than learning from the best available role model, or that taking a role model from what you claim is an extreme minority, rather than building bonds and understanding with the majority, leads to more inclusion, despite that you also claim that inclusion is decreasing, despite that this sort of like-only mentorship is increasing.

It seems like your own data contradicts you. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

[lutorm]

I do understand that your opinion is that a girl will have an emotional need to only learn from women.

That is not what is being said, it is that it may be useful for a girl to not only learn from men.

[arbutus]

Thanks, that is exactly what I'm saying.

[king_jester]

> I believe that choosing to limit one's role models by gender is a problem.

No one is talking about limiting to one kind of role model. Indeed, since women in STEM are not as represented as men, it may be limiting to not allow a student to seek out a role model who is a woman as they may never encounter one by happenstance. Having a role model you identify with, esp. with a trait that is a minority in some group, is one of the ways people can counteract imposter syndrome.

[JohnHaugeland]

I wish you would stop saying "nobody is saying (the thing everyone is actually literally saying)".

Yes, the post saying "I need a woman for a role mode" is limiting one's role models by gender.

[thelibrarian]

No it is not. It is a woman for a rolemodel, not a woman for my one and only and forever rolemodel.

Having a woman for a rolemodel does not exclude also having a man as a rolemodel.

[JohnHaugeland]

A limitation is still a limitation even if it isn't universal.

[king_jester]

If you really believed this, then you would agree that this is true for women in STEM in that the field is heavily stacked with men. It is totally justified to counteract such an implicit limitation in the field by someone putting in extra effort to meet women in STEM.

[mynameisasdf]

Source?